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The Lower Hill’s tangled web

The Lower Hill’s tangled web

The
Pittsburgh Penguins are learning a painful economic development lesson: The public trough
sometimes isn’t the all-you-can-eat buffet they hoped it would be.

The
venerable National Hockey League franchise announced last week that it was
halting development of the 28-acre former Civic Arena site in the city’s Lower
Hill District.

Why? Per
Pens CEO David Morehouse, the process has become “increasingly impossible”
because of the “changing demands and delays” of the city’s Urban Redevelopment
Authority.

Of course,
the Mighty ‘Guins were given a sweetheart deal to develop the tract once home
to “The Igloo.” That, after an initial sweetheart deal diverted public dollars
to build Mario Lemieux a new hockey arena across the street from the old arena.
(Yes, friends, the gambling dollars used are “public dollars.”)

But now, as
this billion-dollar development appeared to be finally gaining significant traction
after a decade-long slog, self-anointed “stakeholders” in the project – those loath
to allow a “beneficent” government intervention to go to waste in demanding
their “fair share” – nitpicked to project suspension the latest “community
benefits” part of the plan.

Indeed, the
Penguins have invested significant time and capital into this project. But, in
addition to being handed those development rights, they’re also beneficiaries
of significant tax breaks.

And given
the players in this development game, and past being prologue, the franchise cannot
feign naivete. Why else would they hire a former top city and authority honcho
to guide them through the bureaucracy?

But that
said, it’s unlikely the Penguins will walk away from this project. And they and
all the government-blessed “stakeholders” will, somehow, come to terms.

But this
blip in the Lower Hill’s redevelopment saga hardly will be the last. The
marketplace that this project wholly perverted faced significant operational
challenges before the coronavirus pandemic hit – think new premium office space
in a climate of already extraordinarily high top-notch office space vacancies
— and the post-pandemic economic environment only adds multiple layers of new
challenges.

The bottom
line remains, however, that if the marketplace had been embraced instead of
being “sweethearted,” and with a tangled mass of attached strings intermingled
with spider and cob webs to boot, the Lower Hill redevelopment likely would be
nearing completion, if not completed years before.

As we are
wont to say in instances such as this, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when
first we practice to intercede.”

Colin
McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute
for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).